Diversifying Food and Diets

Using Agricultural Biodiversity to Improve Nutrition and Health

Jessica Fanzo,Danny Hunter,Teresa Borelli,Federico Mattei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136461453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Ernährung, Diätetik & Bariatrie

Currently 868 million people are undernourished and 195 million children under five years of age are stunted. At the same time, over 1 billion people are overweight and obese in both the developed and developing world. Diseases previously associated with affluence, such as cancer, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease, are on the rise. Food system-based approaches to addressing these problems that could enhance food availability and diet quality through local production and agricultural biodiversity often fall outside the traditional scope of nutrition, and have been under-researched. As a consequence, there remains insufficient evidence to support well-defined, scalable agricultural biodiversity interventions that can be linked to improvements in nutrition outcomes.

Agricultural biodiversity is important for food and nutritional security, as a safeguard against hunger, a source of nutrients for improved dietary diversity and quality, and strengthening local food systems and environmental sustainability. This book explores the current state of knowledge on the role of agricultural biodiversity in improving diets, nutrition and food security. Using examples and case studies from around the globe, the book explores current strategies for improving nutrition and diets and identifies key research and implementation gaps that need to be addressed to successfully promote the better use of agricultural biodiversity for rural and urban populations and societies in transition.

Part I

The state of agricultural biodiversity and nutrition

Overviews, models and themes

1 Harnessing biodiversity

From diets to landscapes

Fabrice DeClerck

Introduction

There is an increasing sense that we are at a global crossroads, at the peak of human potential while on the edge of global disaster. Several authors highlight critical planetary thresholds that have been largely surpassed (Rockstrom et al., 2009), particularly the loss of biodiversity, the failure to meet the 2010 Convention on Biological Diversity targets (Butchart et al., 2010), and the increasing scepticism that we will attain many of the Millennium Development Goals. Amongst these goals, halving the number of people who regularly go hungry is prominent. Novel solutions are urgently required to confront these issues.

There are also refreshingly new perspectives on these problems that offer both guidance and hope that solutions are within reach if we are committed. The most exciting of these solutions are those that are the product of interdisciplinary collaborations aimed at integrated solutions, rather than disciplinary band-aids that offer solutions at the expense of other development problems. These solutions often come from a combined process of divergent and convergent thinking (DeHaan, 2011). Divergent thinking is fostered by brainstorming freely on a problem using a defocused, intuitive approach, while maintaining a particular receptiveness to a broad range of associations (i.e. thinking across disciplinary boundaries). Convergent thinking is then used to synthesize these ideas and bring them back into focus. One way to foster this kind of thinking is by encouraging disciplinary scientists to consider how their specific skill set or knowledge base could be applied to tackle an issue or problem outside of their disciplines (DeClerck et al., 2011a).

This practice has become increasingly common with ecologists, amongst other fields, leading to novel interdisciplinary realms such as ecosystem services (Daily, 1997; Naeem et al., 2009), eco-nutrition (Deckelbaum et al., 2006), eco-health (Borer et al., 2012) and eco-agriculture (McNeely and Scherr, 2003) for example (Table 1.1). Ecosystem services blend the domains of ecology, economic and social sciences; eco-nutrition brings together the science of nutrition, agronomy and ecology; eco-agriculture calls on close collaboration with landscape planners, political leaders, farmers and community groups and a broad range of professionals from ecology, agronomy, and economics amongst other disciplines within mixed-use landscapes. In each case, traditional disciplinary boundaries are broken and interaction between disciplines is fostered. The first step in fostering this interaction is ‘semantic mediation’, or creating a common language. More importantly it requires participants to focus on process and to hold off on considerations of specific contexts until a broader interdisciplinary perspective is developed. This chapter explores how integrating ecology and ecological thinking into nutrition and agricultural development can be used to develop novel solutions to development problems by particularly focusing on ecology, nutrition and agriculture.

Table 1.1 Definition of four interdisciplinary communities of practice, their core disciplines and groups involved, stated goals and key references regarding select examples of ecology's integration in other disciplines

Integrated efforts	Core disciplines/groups	Goals	Reference
Eco-nutrition	• nutrition • agronomy • ecology • economics	Integrate nutrition and human health, agriculture and food production, environmental health, and economic development to jointly reduce malnutrition, increase agricultural productivity, protect the environment, and promote economic development.	Deckelbaum et al., 2006
Eco-agriculture	• ecology • agriculture • economics • development practitioners • community groups	Rural communities jointly manage their resources to enhance rural livelihoods, conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services; and develop more sustainable and productive agricultural systems.	McNeely and Scherr, 2003
Ecosystem services	• ecology • countless other fields	To recognize the contribution of natural and managed ecosystems to human well-being and livelihood. In the broadest sense these include services such as clean water, clean air, agricultural productivity through pollination and pest control services for example.	Daily, 1997 MEA, 2005
Eco-health	• ecology • health sciences	To better understand the connections between nature, society, and health, and how drivers of social and ecosystem change ultimately will also influence human health and well-being.	Wilcox et al., 2004

A rapid review of the problem

Nutrition

Unfortunately, the first similarity between the fields of nutrition, agriculture and environment is the current gloomy outlook! It is often cited that more than one billion of the world's population lack access to food or are chronically malnourished. On the flip side, a 2006 World Health Report predicts that by 2015 there will be 2.3 billion overweight adults and more than 700 million obese. This ‘double burden’ suggests that nearly half (47 per cent) of the global population is suffering from some form of nutritional disorder. The poor are particularly hard hit with these two paradoxical problems, hunger and obesity. In many parts of the world, the poor are dependent on subsistence systems subject to the vagaries of rainfed agriculture where the primary challenge is a struggle to simply produce enough calories to survive. In contrast, many of the urban poor, including in the United States, are faced with levels of obesity tapering off at 35 per cent for adults. Again, in developed countries such as the United States, rates have risen to nearly 60 per cent among non-Hispanic black women and to nearly 45 per cent among Mexican American women since 2004. Among children and teens, about 21 per cent of Hispanics and 24 per cent of blacks are obese compared with 14 per cent of non-Hispanic whites (Ogden et al., 2012; Flegal et al., 2012). Several studies have suggested that the poor cannot afford to eat healthily, which at times is due to a lack of access to food (calories), or which can be driven by a lack of access to dietary diversity (Franco et al., 2009) leading to literal food deserts typically found in poor urban neighbourhoods (Gordon et al., 2011; though see recent articles discrediting this notion: An and Sturm, 2012). There is growing recognition however that the food we eat has a direct impact on our own health, as well as the health of the environment (Nugent, 2011).

Agriculture

Agriculture is faced with similar challenges. Recent reviews and analyses highlight the current twin challenges of feeding the 9 billion global inhabitants projected for 2050 while decreasing the growing environmental footprint of agriculture (Tilman et al., 2011; Foley et al., 2011; Rockstrom et al., 2009). While agriculture has met the challenge of producing for growing populations in the past, notably through the Green Revolution, this increase has come at tremendous environmental cost. Agricultural expansion is the primary driver of biodiversity loss with more than 70 per cent of global grasslands, 50 per cent of savannahs, 45 per cent of temperate deciduous forests, and 27 per cent of tropical forests converted to agriculture. Global fertilizer use has increased more than 500 per cent leading to significant impacts on global water and nitrogen cycles in particular. In terms of disruptions to the carbon cycle, agriculture has contributed to 30–35 per cent of global greenhouse gases (Foley et al., 2011) and is likely to be one of the industries most impacted by global climate change. The focus on agricultural intensification has also led to a singular focus on a handful of crop species, primarily in the grass family. Three crops, wheat, maize and rice, occupy approximately 40 per cent of the global agricultural landscape (Tilman, 1999a). Not only is tremendous crop diversity lost though agricultural intensification, the intraspecific, or genetic diversity of both major and minor crop species is lost, eroding the capacity of agricultural systems to weather shocks.

Agricultural systems are increasingly vulnerable to climate change, globalization, the increasing price of inputs such as water and fertilizer, and the degradation of the natural resource base. These problems are likely to be significant obstacles, particularly for small-scale farmers. The free pass that agriculture has enjoyed over the past decades regarding agricultural productivity at any cost is coming to a close with increasing public pressure for food production systems that contribute to environmental protection while supporting farming communities. The agriculture of the next three decades will need to continue its impressive yield increases while halting or reversing its negative impact on the environment. Agricultural landscapes must become net producers of ecosystem services rather than consumer services. This necessitates a movement towards multifunctional landscapes.

Environment

As with human nutrition and agriculture, global environmental concerns are rising. Butchart et al. (2010) highlight that most indicators of the state of biodiversity are declining with no significant reductions in rates observed. In contrast, indicators of pressures on biodiversity continue to increase. In many cases, the negative declines are tied to agriculture and include the direct impact of agricultural expansion on the loss of habitat for biodiversity. Although species extinctions are natural, never in the history of the earth has one species, our own, been the cause of the mass extinction of so many others. Current extinction rates are 1,000–10,000 times greater than background extinction rates (Rockstrom et al., 2009); a disaster that E.O. Wilson (1994) argues has far greater consequences than economic collapse or nuclear war. Rockstrom et al. (2009) evaluated nine critical planetary thresholds that require the effort of a global collective and which must not be surpassed in order to maintain a stable and resilient human society. Of the nine thresholds identified (phorphorus/nitrogen cycle, climate change, global freshwater use, change in land use, biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading, chemical pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion and ocean acidification), two have been significantly surpassed: the rate of biodiversity loss is more than ten times the proposed threshold value; and disruption to the nitrogen cycling is approximately 3.5 times the proposed threshold value. It is hard not to see the impact of agriculture in both of these out-of-bounds indicators in addition to the environmental impacts mentioned above.

Integrated approaches to solutions

Traditionally, issues of hunger have been the domain of nutrition, crop production, the domain of agronomy, and environmental conservation, the domain of ecology. The review of emergent global concerns above however demonstrates the important role of agriculture in all three issues. The majority of the foods that provide us with our nutrition come from agricultural fields that compete with biodiversity for space. There are deeper relationships that are not as obvious however. The nutritional value and the flavours of our foods are ultimately the result of complex interactions between crops and their environment. The protein content of beans is the result of a symbiotic relationship with bacteria inhabiting the roots of legumes; the pungent flavour of peppers is the result of an antagonistic interaction between the chilli pepper, a weevil and a fungus. Most of the flavours that spice our meals are the result of these negative interactions, or arms races, between plants and their pests and diseases. These are all interactions that have occurred on evolutionary timescales.

On shorter timescales, the production of many fruits such as almonds, apples and pears is wholly dependent on a host of bees and other insects that pollinate the flowers facilitating fruit production. The conversion of leaf litter to soil organic matter is the result of a host of invisible, and underappreciated communities of soil microflora and fauna (whose value we would quickly learn to appreciate if they disappeared). Whether the nutritional value of the foods we eat, or simply the production of many of these crops within farmers’ fields, we quickly realize that food production and nutrition are tied to ecosystem services, and that human nutrition is a component of human well-being that is ultimately dependent on numerous ecosystem services that operate from microscopic to landscape scales (Figure 1.1; Table 1.2).

Ecosystem services

The late 1990s brought a fresh look at humans and their interactions with the environment starting with a renewed realization of society's dependence on nature's services. Daily's (1997) multi-authored volume Nature's Services and the more recent synthetic work of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005) were key to highlighting this dependence. Ecosystem services are defined as the conditions and processes through which ecosystems and the species that comprise them sustain and contribute to human livelihoods (Table 1.1; Daily, 1997). The MEA ...